TSA turns the gloves on itself

Nilda C. Marugame, a TSA agent at Lihue Airport in Hawaii, is suing the Department of Homeland Security, TSA’s parent agency, for sexual assault. She says she was retaliated against when she went through the proper chain of command to report it. (That chain-of-command thing is beloved of bureaucrats and people who believe that all you have to do to achieve justice is tell the truth.)

Marugame says she is, to her knowledge, the third woman who received unwanted sexual advances from one particular TSA employee, a Transportation Security Investigator (TSI).

After Maragume reported her incident, she says she was forced to sign a statement disavowing it:

Marugame says she was suspended for three days, after being “forced … to sign a document stating that the TSI did not sexually harass her”. She claims her boss suspended her “rather than addressing and disciplining the behavior of a sexual predator in the workplace.”

She says the alleged predator “was not subjected to any discipline, while each of his victims were disciplined.”

*2015 UPDATE: Still no word from TSA on public comments* The public comment period on the TSA's electronic strip-search scanners and "pat-downs" closed on June 25, 2013. That public comment period had been ordered by the courts, an order the TSA ignored for almost two years before it finally complied. The agency must issue a report on the many thousands (or more?) of comments it received. Yet here it is 2015 and still no report. If the TSA ever complies with the requirement to issue that report, we'll let you know.

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